Seven months after The Golden Bachelor star Gerry Turner met his now-fiancée Lana Sutton, he’s sharing more details about how they first connected. Turner previously revealed that he and Sutton met after she sent him a DM, and now he’s revealing what those early messages said.
Although Turner was approached by plenty of women via DM after his time on The Golden Bachelor in 2023, he said Sutton stood out because they had many mutual friends.
“I go, ‘OK, I’ll answer that one,’” he revealed in a new interview with Us Weekly. “So we kind of went through social media step by step and I [finally] just said, ‘I have nothing to lose here. I’m gonna ask her out.’”
Turner revealed that Sutton had watched him on the show, where he got engaged to Theresa Nist, whom he was married to for three months before their split in April 2024. While recalling the first message he received from Sutton, Turner revealed, “The comment she made more than once is, ‘Oh my God, you were so hot. I really wanted to meet you.” I don’t know that her intentions were just platonic. We were just both open-minded. I’ve gone down that road a number of times and found women that were great people, but they just weren’t for me.”
Earlier this month, Turner revealed that he and Sutton were engaged. As for what makes their relationship work so well, he said, “We’re both enjoying the travel, adventure, and spontaneity.” Earlier in the interview, he noted that he was expecting that life with Nist, but said he was disappointed when she decided to continue dedicating most of her time to her career instead.
“On the show, I asked Theresa if she was ready to quit her job. She said, ‘When I meet the right guy, I’m ready to end my career,’” Turner claimed. “What I heard was, ‘There is a woman who’s going to be willing to travel, to have some adventure to do, some things that I consider and that we should consider fun.’ And then after the show, she always went back to, ‘Well, I really want to keep working.’ And that just pretty much makes it an impossible situation.”
With Sutton, Turner said, “I feel how much she cares for me, some of the little gestures and so forth. I’ve never seen her without a smile on her face and a positive attitude. It’s just so uplifting. And I’ll occasionally drift off thinking about the health situation I have, and, man, she just smacks me and says, ‘Hey, we’re going to enjoy every day we have.’ And I really could not be more blessed to have found a person who’s so compatible with me.”
Turner was diagnosed with a form of bone marrow cancer in 2024, but said he continues to have no symptoms. “Every visit since has been a little more positive, because I talked to [the doctor] about these symptoms, and I said, ‘What happens when I do get those symptoms?’ And he goes, ‘You may never get to that point, and if you do, there’s some drugs that will be very uncomfortable for you to take, but there are also drugs that may knock the progression of this cancer back 5, 6, 7 years.’”
